Private Janitors Urged For City Schools

Cost-cutting Proposal Is Labeled `Anti-union'

For years, reformers have tried to get their budget knives into one of the most guarded fiefdoms of the Chicago Public Schools-union janitors and those who oversee them.

On Tuesday, the School Finance Authority recommended lopping off that portion of the school system altogether and contracting out the work.

The proposal is one of the most aggressive local attempts to turn government jobs over to private companies and promises to test the influence of unions in a state where the legislature is now controlled by Republicans.

Backers of the proposal, which now goes to the Board of Education for consideration, say it would save taxpayers $88 million a year and allow the school system to direct all of its energies toward teaching, while leaving maintenance to outside firms.

Over three years, the plan would affect some 3,300 jobs by shifting 2,200 custodians off the public payroll and eliminating 1,100 supervisors and "firemen" in charge of heating systems.

Finance Authority chairman Martin Koldyke said most of the custodians could expect to get union jobs with the companies hired to do the work.

Nevertheless, the plan was immediately blasted as "anti-union and anti-employee" by a group that represents the unions that would be affected.

Parts, if not all, of the plan are expected to be well received by members of the Board of Education, according to board members. The board faces chronic funding shortfalls and needs to prove to the Republican-dominated Illinois General Assembly that it is putting its fiscal house in order.

The proposal is one of the boldest among a slew of initiatives by the schools, the city and the Chicago Park District to transfer government jobs to private companies.

Privatization proponents say that saves money by eliminating the inefficiencies that bureaucracies breed.

Critics say it is a way for politicians to spread pinstripe patronage at the expense of workers who have spent careers in government jobs.

School Board member Charles Curtis, chairman of the facilities committee, said discussion of the proposal could take most of the spring and a plan could be voted on by June 1. Although he hadn't seen the final proposal, he said changes should be expected.

"I don't think we can take up anything and adopt it wholesale," Curtis said. "We need to see what makes sense."

If implemented, the plan would allow the school system to eliminate 400 firemen jobs that reformers have long charged are obsolete and exist only because of union clout. Firemen were originally charged with stoking coal furnaces and now oversee heating and cooling systems in the schools.

"There hasn't been a coal-fire boiler in a generation," said Inge Fryklund, the consultant who drafted the plan. "The schools have a tremendous deficit. Children don't have the resources that they need. We are paying people for a job that basically doesn't exist."

Some 700 operating engineers would also lose their jobs. Engineers, who make an average of $44,000 a year, oversee maintenance of the schools, but do little or none of the work themselves, according to their job description.

Under the city code, the district needs 10, not 700, operating engineers, the consultant's report said.

The district will save $60 million alone in wages and benefits by eliminating fireman and operating engineer positions, Fryklund said.

Koldyke said those workers would be free to form companies to bid on the maintenance contracts or could join companies hired to do the work.

"They may very well be employed in some supervisory capacity by the winning bidders but won't be employed in the same capacity that they (are) today," Koldyke said.

As for the 2,200 custodians, Koldyke said very few would likely lose their jobs.

"The vast majority will be employed in the same place or a similar place in the same capacity," he said. "The assumption is all of these people will be members of a union, maybe not the same union."

Nevertheless, the unions involved bristled at the proposal.

"The report is so absurd it does not deserve comment, other than to label it for what it is: an anti-union, anti-employee report designed to ultimately terminate more than 9,000 dedicated and hard-working Board of Education employees," said John Code, chairman of Coalition of School Board Unions.

Fryklund, the report's author, acknowledged that the plan offers no guarantees for the workers.

"The only people who deserve any guarantees are the children," she said.

The plan would put ownership of the school buildings and grounds into a new public authority.

In the first year, 50 to 100 schools would volunteer to become contract schools. The schools would be grouped into five clusters with a different general contractor hired for each.

Each general contractor would provide all custodial, repair and maintenance service for its cluster. A facilities manager would be the single point of contact and be responsible to each principal.

Over a two- to four-year period, all schools would be transferred to contract status and the school board would eliminate virtually all facilities positions, with the exception of planners.